I liked parts of this collection but i felt it focused too heavily on more modern writing and less so on earlier writing. This was generally curated well and i did like it but some of the choices were a bit dry or dragged on for way too long. It's not something i would pick up again to read recreationally but if i was studying again, then I'd gravitate towards it.

I was reluctant to review this book for the zero effort that it made in collating bring out the lesser know or obscure feminist writers that have existed. An opportunity to include all the intersectional and marginalized feminists were simply obliterated, in result we are presented with classic feminist giants who themselves and their ideas(writing) is already know and populated continually.
This was LEAST EFFORT put in terms or representation. A white washed blinkered view of
women writing.

It was a great read! It covers a range of topics and authors and it was far more educational than I expected.

Anthologies are a great way to be introduced to authors and/or subjects you are interested in so as soon as I saw this book I expected to love it. As mentioned in previous reviews I have been reading more non-fiction, one of the main subjects being feminist writing, my expectations were high and they were definitely met.
There's a lot going on and it's quite a big book, which I think makes it perfect for both people who just started feminist reading and for people that have already read quite a few books/authors. Out of the over 100 entries I knew a lot of the most popular authors and essays but I didn't have the chance to read them before, so this book definitely gives you a great kickstarter to most of them and a good idea of what you want to read more of in the future. Overall I would definitely recommend this book.

The selection of writers and poets collected in this book is incredibly diverse, which makes it an ideal introduction to feminism. Informative, refreshing and empowering; "The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing" shows that feminism has always existed and women were always reflecting on and fighting against many of the things we are still discussing today.

I love it. This collection covers just a vast range of writing and it is the perfect springboard to use in class - in fact I have already created some lessons based around some of the speeches within. Such a valuable resource for educators so thank you so much for giving me the privilege of reading it. It will become a staffroom staple I am sure!

(Twitter)
This is a beautiful reference book of the history of feminist writing edited by @DrHannahDawson. From a 1405 text to modern day - 116 powerful texts to study. @classicpenguins @PenguinUKBooks

I really enjoyed this collection. Lots of voices I was unfamiliar with, some brilliant and thought-provoking reads here.

Can't beat a good feminist essay/short story and this is no exception. Definitely recommend this to all the ladies out there. I learned something from each piece that I read.

A thorough fascinating look at feminism.Fascinating group of essays written by women in the past and present.Essays that gave me a lot to think about and discuss.The layout is excellent will make a great starting point for what feminism encompasses,#netgalley#penguinuk

I enjoyed the variety of writing in here and would recommend it to anyone who wants to get more insight into feminist writing throughout the years. It covers a broad scope that makes a perfect jumping off point to go and read more works from any number of the amazing women who are featured in here.

I was fortunate to get an ARC of this book via NetGalley, and wondered how reflective of feminism this was going to be, and I was pleased that so many different perspectives were included in this book giving me the reader a broad base of perspectives that is so important.

The breadth of writers, speechmakers and poets collected in this book is incredibly diverse and makes it such an ideal primer for feminism that you can take from and take in throughout and going back into history including important women including Sojourner Truth's 'Ain't I A Woman' speech, including the work of Barrett Browning and Kishida Toshiko's 'Girls In Boxes' speech which has stayed with me since I read it in this collection.

Covering topics including fatphobia thanks to the work of Susie Orbach, Jewish feminism thanks to the writing of Judith Plaskow and Prison Abolitionism thanks to the work of Angela Davis, this book an incredible variety of feminist perspectives with each new piece connecting beautifully to the next and making it a book that I found incredibly compelling from beginning to end - the book never feeling too much considering it's size thanks to poetry and short pieces that never stop being interesting.

I really appreciated this book and am certainly going to do so much more reading from the writers collected in this book as I feel this is an excellent place to start if you're just beginning to get some insight into feminism.

(I received an ARC from Netgalley for honest review).

The formatting was a little confusing on my kindle. However, was a good, in depth overview of feminist writing - including some of the very early writings, which surprised me. Took me a while to read due to intense nature of some of it

Having read a number of feminist authors during thr 1970's to 2000's and feminist novels from the 19th and 20th century I was interested to find out more about women who wrote before them. I think this book is a good introduction to them and what was notable es how well they were educated and wrote but largely ignored/ not promoted, despite being at least as good a their famous male counterparts. A definite addition to the library.

This is a book which left me feeling infuriated and uplifted at the same time: infuriated (not because of the book itself, I hasten to add) because Christine de Pizan (and other women involved in the medieval querelle de femmes) have been calling out systematic sexism for 600 years and yet her text still speaks to contemporary concerns; but also at least hopeful that such a community of women who are bright, committed, angry, thoughtful, sexy, humorous, scholarly, diverse, global can exist, if only virtually, in the pages of this anthology.

With an opening entry from Pizan in 1405 to the final extract from 2020 on abolition feminism, this is a collection which is wide-ranging, self-consciously intersectional, and willing to embrace the established (e.g. Wollstonecraft, Woolf), the iconic (e.g. de Beauvoir, Audrey Lorde) as well as the more subversive (e.g.Emma Goldman, Incite!), even anarchic (Rosa Luxemburg, Valerie Solanas' S.C.U.M. Manifesto). We hear voices from across time and geographies as women explore how their feminist identities co-exist with race, class, religion, health, sexualities, even family and social roles.

Along the route we meet women challenging slavery and racism, genital mutilation (a chilling piece to read), sexual and gendered roles, as well as thinking productively and questioningly about motherhood, sisterhood, the racialised parameters of white Eurocentric feminism, the female body, marriage and some of the more pernicious manifestations of implicit sexism: Mantel on the patriarchal approach of the medical profession, for example (including female clinicians). There is emotional honesty here (Cusk on 'her' children during a hostile divorce), as well as brilliant scholarship (Judith Butler, Jacqueline Rose), and an underpinning of economic analysis that has long correlated misogyny with capitalism.

I especially like that Dawson has been open about the range and scope of feminist writing: political speeches and activist group manifestos sit happily alongside research articles, sociological papers, opinion pieces and fictional extracts (Jane Eyre), short stories (The Yellow Wallpaper, Angela Carter) and poetry (Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou). We are all likely to have read, learned from, even taught in our turn some of these women, but there is much here that was either new to me or which I'd heard of but never read.

All the same, in some ways it is dispiriting to see how slow change has been since de Pizan wrote her City of Ladies in the late fourteenth century - and I sometimes get the feeling that contemporary feminism may have lost touch with, or may not be aware of, its own history as we trace the reemergence of ideas such as intersectionality, for example - it may not have been named that in the past but when Sojourner Truth, a Black woman, repeats her refrain of 'And ain't I a woman?' in 1851, that's exactly what she's questioning.

Overall, though, a hopeful, optimistic project which refuses to be bowed and has all the oppressions of patriarchy in its sights

This anthology begins with an excellent, broad-ranging introduction by Hannah Dawson, in which she writes, “To try and make people see what is right in front of their eyes: this is core to the history of feminism, as it has been to the history of all human rights struggles.”

The collection contains writing across a period of 600 years, including a diverse range of contemporary writers like Bell Hooks, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Bernadine Evaristo. International voices are included, so the book doesn’t simply amplify the four waves of western perspective, but a global experience, also encompassing race, class and sexuality. Enlightening and empowering.